Soldiers everywhere are paid, and good generals know it is dangerous to mess with a soldier’s money. The shoeless heroes who froze at Valley Forge were paid, and when their pay did not come they threatened to leave – and some did. Soldiers have families and will not fight for a nation that allows their families to starve. But to say that the tribes who fight with us are “rented” is perhaps as vile a slander as to say that George Washington’s men would have left him if the British offered a better deal.

Equally misguided were some senators’ attempts to use Gen. Petraeus’s statement, that there could be no purely military solution in Iraq, to dismiss our soldiers’ achievements as “merely” military. In a successful counterinsurgency it is impossible to separate military and political success. The Sunni “awakening” was not primarily a military event any more than it was “bribery.” It was a political event with enormous military benefits.

The huge drop in roadside bombings is also a political success – because the bombings were political events. It is not possible to bury a tank-busting 1,500-pound bomb in a neighborhood street without the neighbors noticing. Since the military cannot watch every road during every hour of the day (that would be a purely military solution), whether the bomb kills soldiers depends on whether the neighbors warn the soldiers or cover for the terrorists. Once they mostly stood silent; today they tend to pick up their cell phones and call the Americans. Even in big “kinetic” military operations like the taking of Baqubah in June 2007, politics was crucial. Casualties were a fraction of what we expected because, block-by-block, the citizens told our guys where to find the bad guys. I was there; I saw it.

Why is Barack Obama so comfortable around people who so despise America and its allies? Maybe it’s because they’re so comfortable around him.

He presents as the transcendent agent of “change.” Sounds platitudinous, but it’s really quite strategically vaporous. Sen. Obama is loath to get into the details of how we should change, and, as the media’s Chosen One, he hasn’t had to.

Unless something really wild happens, Barry’s getting the nomination (or Denver is gonna be on fire before the end of the Dem convention). So, even though he’s avoided the microscopulously minutious scrutiny one would usually expect the MSM to put any Presidential candidate under (yeah, that’s a joke), there is no way in hell it will continue when the general election kicks into gear. While McCain has pledged to run a campaign eschewing “attack” politics, the Dems are already gearing up to use exactly that tactic against him.

You gotta know 527s from the Republican side are gonna return fire, and they are going to bring up this kind of stuff:

Judging from the company he chooses to keep, Obama’s change would radically alter this country. He eschews detail because most Americans don’t believe we’re a racist, heartless, imperialist cesspool of exploitation. The details would be disqualifying.

A smart political operative said within earshot of me yesterday that if Hillary has more metaphorical bombshells to drop on Obama — and this operative has heard secondhand that she does — she’ll do so between April 16, the date of her next debate with Obama, and April 22, Pennsylvania’s primary day. The timing, of course, is so she doesn’t get asked about it by the moderator or confronted by Obama.

A search through my older posts will show I have a fairly large level of disdain for McCain. But I gotta give the coot this: he’s made it clear he doesn’t want to play dirty, while the Dems, whether against each other or against a Republican opponent, have made it clear that will be their modus operandi.

Who do you believe has a better chance of winning “independents” or “undecided voters” once this vitriol hits the airwaves?